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Opinion: Second Amendment’s true intent

Letter to the editor
Published 4:04 p.m. ET Jan. 24, 2018

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Police say the gunman in the Las Vegas Strip shooting had 23 firearms in his hotel room and an additional 19 at one of his two homes. Police say they're searching for a motive for the shooting. (Oct. 3)
AP

The gun lobby and resultant extraordinary proliferation of guns, especially those designed and manufactured for mass killings of citizenry, could not have been anticipated by the framers of the Constitution. It makes no sense to deny that armament corporations and the gun lobby take ownership rights so far beyond the “original intent” it makes the Second Amendment to all intents and purposes unrecognizable.

As ratified, the Second Amendment states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Yet, even if the security of our free state was threatened from within or without what exactly is the character of a “well regulated militia” in today’s terms?

No amount of guns in the hands of the rank and file of undisciplined and unregulated populace can make us believe they are the keepers of a free state. Without the discipline and organization needed to exercise and implement the intent of the Second Amendment, there is no reason to think the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is as necessary as was originally intended by the framers. We do have, after all, the National Guard that is well-regulated where we can exercise our civic duty to act in concert with the state in defense of the state.

Therefore, the question that gun rights “shall not be infringed” is a dubious constitutional proposition that needs to be reexamined in light of the realities of the heavy burden we face in a violent and divided domestic society that is, in itself, the greatest threat to our freedom.